Top tips to promoting your book

Author and publisher Jo Parfitt and career consultant Colleen Reichrath-Smith are celebrating the release of the latest edition of A Career in Your Suitcase: a practical guide to creating meaningful work… anywhere (4th ed) (Summertime Publishing 2013). If you missed the pair’s Top six tips to promote your brand new book, below is a summary. Find the full article at www.joparfit.com.

Make a book trailer. We used Camtasia to make ours, combining not only recordings of us speaking about the book, but also book jackets, our photos and some music. … Here is the link to our book trailer.

Create a website just for the book. If you only plan to publish a few books then it can make sense to give each their own unique website, using the book name as its URL. See www.careerinyoursuitcase.com.

Create and send a press release. As the publisher at Summertime Publishing, it was vital that I create a database of expatriate clubs, organisations, websites, magazines and journalists who were interested in my niche – books by and for people living abroad. My list so far has about 400 names on it and so, as soon as a Summertime book is available on all the Amazons worldwide in print and kindle format, I prepare a release that includes all the relevant information about the book, written in a way that people could lift the text and use it as it is. I offer review copies and add contact details, suggesting the authors may be available for interview or to write articles for their publication. See our press here.

Run a worldwide book tour. Grab every opportunity to present the book, at book signings, by giving workshops and by donating books to libraries. Take photos of every event so you have more stuff to share on the website and via social media. But a book tour does not simply work if it includes you in person. Additionally, create a proof PDF of your book (put the word ‘proof’ on the pages so folk can’t copy it), create a Facebook event and invite everyone you know to do a review of the book on Amazon, or Goodreads or on their blog or in a magazine in exchange for a free PDF/kindle copy. If you see folk in person then you can give them a ‘real’ book to review. A review is a great way to get the word about your book out there. The official date of our book tour is 19th April. On that day we will be sure to have a Google Alert set up for Career in Your Suitcase to be sure we ‘catch’ every mention of our book out there and then, in turn we will share that with our networks too. We have also set the #careerinyoursuitcase4 hashtag on Twitter for people to use so we can track all tweets. You can link to our Facebook event here.

Do a live book launch where you live. We always encourage authors to run a book launch event for their book once it is freely available on Amazon worldwide. … We invite all our local supporters, the press and even ExpatTV along as well as all those who have helped with the book – editors, designers, proof-readers and so on. It’s a bit of a celebration. We run ours from 6-8pm on a Friday usually, and have drinks and a few nibbles on offer. During the launch, we have an MC who supports the work of the book. We will have Canadian Deborah Valentine, who is executive director of a local expatriate support network called Access, at our launch. Then Colleen and I will read extracts from the book for 10-15 minutes before we open for questions. You can find a link to our event here.

Join Kindle KDP select. … This means that you can select a five-day period in which the book will be available on Kindle for FREE. We have set our KDP days for just before our live launch (12-16 May) but after the worldwide virtual book tour. This will allow us to give promotion another boost and keep momentum going.You can link to the book on Kindle here.

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JO PARFITT:
When professional writer Jo Parfitt joined her new husband in Dubai and received a stamp in her passport that read ‘Not Permitted to Take up Employment’ she was devastated. Since then she has let nothing prevent her from maintaining a professional identity regardless of regular intercontinental moves and the responsibilities of her family. Jo went on to create and sustain a shifting portfolio of portable careers, ranging from writing a cookbook called Dates in Oman through being a successful journalist in Dubai to running seminars and workshops worldwide from her current home in The Netherlands. In 1998 she realised it was time to write a book that would inspire and empower others to develop their own career in a suitcase too. 2013 sees the launch of the fourth edition of Career in Your Suitcase, this time in collaboration with Colleen. With a permanently evolving portable career to keep her busy, Jo has run Summertime Publishing since 1997 and now has 70 books in her stable, most of which are by or for other people living abroad. In 2012 she launched ExpatBookshop.com to enable her to promote them. Find out more about Jo, her workshops, her consultancy and what makes her heart sing, through her blog at JoParfitt.com or via SummertimePublishing.com
COLLEEN REICHRATH-SMITH:
Colleen believes in teaching people the skills they will need to make the most of their career journey, to make personally meaningful choices for their career. Colleen made an international transition in 2005 when she moved from Canada to the Netherlands for love after almost ten years working in the field of career development. Seeing it as the ultimate chance to apply the career development principles she teaches others, within two years she had learned the language and was again delivering career development training. This time in Dutch. After meeting Jo Parfitt at Connecting Women and the European Professional Women’s Network, Colleen decided to follow her intuition and discuss the idea of a book further with Jo. This edition of Career in Your Suitcase is the result and incorporates lessons learned and the career development principles needed for today’s mobile career adventurer.
Visit http://careerinyoursuitcase.com/speaking/ to book Colleen as a speaker for your next conference or event or http://careerinyoursuitcase.com/workshops/ to find out about Career in Your Suitcase workshops.

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